Pubdate: Sun, 07 Jan 2001
Source: Baltimore Sun (MD)
Copyright: 2001 The Baltimore Sun, a Times Mirror Newspaper.
Contact:  501 N. Calvert Street P.0. Box 1377 Baltimore, MD 21278
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Author: David L. Greene

'METH' CUTS A SWATH THROUGH THE HEARTLAND

Drug Gangs, Home Labs Behind Spreading Use Of Stimulant In Neb.

LEXINGTON, Neb. - Here in the heart of America's heartland, healthy corn 
crops, juicy steaks, amiable neighbors and winning Cornhusker football 
teams are the pleasures that have long kept people happy.

But recently, folks here have experimented with a different pleasure. This 
one's illegal.

Methamphetamine, a stimulant long prevalent on the East and West coasts, 
pushed by rogue motorcycle gangs, has become a new pastime. Take a 
population admired for rural innocence, mix in a powerful, available drug 
that breeds violence, and the results are stunning.

On farms, housewives are taking the drug for extra energy to finish chores, 
and their marriages and families are ending up destroyed. Here in 
Lexington, population 9,000, gang violence is on the rise as members of 
Mexican cartels descend to meet the drug demand.

Meth-traffickers have been arrested in tiny towns like Dannebrog, with just 
320 residents. And in equally small places, police are stumbling upon 
makeshift labs where people have tried to combine household and 
agricultural chemicals - often in dangerously toxic mixtures - to 
manufacture methamphetamine.

"It has overwhelmed us," says Glenn Kemp, an investigator with a Nebraska 
drug task force. "It wasn't hard to believe when Iowa got a 
[methamphetamine] problem. Or Kansas or Missouri. But Nebraska? South 
Dakota? Here's wholesomeness. Well, come to our communities. We're no 
different from anywhere else, even if we're less populated. Why can't we be 
the meth capital of the United States?"

It may seem like the nation's most unlikely drug war, but authorities have 
an explanation for the rise of methamphetamine - which is also known as 
"meth," "crank" or "speed" and can be smoked, sniffed or injected. Over the 
past decade, low-skill meat-packing plants have sprouted in small towns, 
drawing an enormous Hispanic population seeking jobs. Police say their 
arrival has allowed drug-peddling gangs from Mexico and California to 
infiltrate farm towns where, a decade ago, they would have stood out.

Meanwhile, recipes for homemade meth have become accessible on the 
Internet. An important ingredient - anhydrous ammonia - is used by farmers 
in irrigation and is widely available. Users can steal anhydrous ammonia 
from farm storage tanks, pick up other ingredients (such as cold medication 
and lithium batteries) at a convenience store, and cook meth for themselves.

"It was curiosity that made me start," says May, a 36-year-old Nebraska 
native and recovering user from Lexington who asked that her last name not 
be used. She says she used to buy meth from a pig farmer who manufactured 
it himself. Friends were using meth, and May couldn't resist. "They had 
energy and company all the time," she says. "They were happy and always 
laughing."

A mother of five, May quit using in January. In February, she was served 
with a federal indictment on charges of drug distribution. Months earlier, 
she had put a relative who wanted to sell meth in touch with a buyer in 
Lexington, not realizing her actions opened her to charges of drug 
distribution. She expects to escape jail time because she has cooperated 
with prosecutors.

"I know I've taken a lot of drugs off the street," she says with an air of 
pride. "But [Lexington] is probably the meth capital of Nebraska. It's in 
the schools. It's everywhere."

Meth has spread to Spalding, a Greeley County community of 582 residents in 
the desolate Sandhills region of central Nebraska. The welcome sign says 
"Spalding Has It! Business and Recreation."

In October, Spalding's part-time police officer and a sheriff's deputy 
recovered chemicals used to make methamphetamine in a farmhouse. Excited by 
their discovery - and unaware that trained drug officers use bodysuits and 
oxygen masks when handling such materials - the officers put the chemicals 
in their patrol car, took them to the village hall and spread them on a table.

When a special drug enforcement team reached Spalding the next day, it shut 
down the hall and the town's main street for 14 hours, disposed of the 
contaminated table, ordered the carpeting scrubbed and told the county 
attorney to throw away his clothing because he had been standing in the 
room for too long.

"There are only three officers in our county," says Paul Asche, the sheriff 
in Greeley County, which includes Spalding. "We sometimes struggle to get 
the day-to-day stuff done. We don't have resources to spend manpower on 
drug investigations."

In 1997, authorities in Nebraska uncovered two meth labs in the state. In 
1999, they found 38, and they discovered 35 last year. They look at 
neighboring states and see how the problems can multiply. Iowa officials 
found 85 labs in 1997, and then 500 in 1999. In Kansas, the number of 
discovered labs jumped from 99 to 492 in the three-year span.

The Nebraska Crime Commission reports that meth-related arrests by state 
drug task forces shot up by 160 percent between 1996 and 1999, from 278 to 
720. County attorneys around Nebraska say they are being forced to ignore 
lesser offenses - such as growing marijuana - that may have brought stiff 
sentences and made headlines a decade ago. Crime labs across the state are 
struggling with a backlog of meth to examine.

In 1996, Congress labeled portions of the Midwest a High Intensity Drug 
Trafficking Area (HIDTA), and began funneling $8 million a year to Iowa, 
Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and the Dakotas to combat meth. But the money is 
spread thin. Nebraska's share, $1.1 million, has been enough to launch a 
successful awareness campaign and hire a handful of drug experts who 
crisscross the state. But many county sheriff's departments - some amount 
to a single sheriff - and the Nebraska State Patrol are often alone in 
dealing with meth.

"This is a whole new drug, with a whole new type of people," says Nancy 
Martinez, who coordinates Nebraska's arm of HIDTA from the U.S. attorney's 
office in Omaha. "Most of our deputies didn't go to the FBI academy. They 
aren't trained. They didn't know what to do with it. They started having 
meth dealers, and whole drug-trafficking organizations. They're good guys, 
but they don't have the training."

There are towns in Nebraska that have been wholly transformed by the meth 
problem, farm communities with streets now home to gangs, jails full of 
users and county attorneys flooded with drug cases. Take Lexington, a town 
of 9,006 people that looks like an ordinary farm community, with its grain 
elevator towering over a main strip of shops and businesses.

It has a meat-packing plant and a growing Hispanic population and sits 
along Interstate 80, which has become an artery for smuggling meth across 
Nebraska. The sheriff's department made 102 meth-related arrests in 1999, 
and 67 through September of last year. But meth - which can cause fits of 
paranoia or violence - has been linked to other crimes, including seven 
homicides since 1994.

Paul Schwarz, a native, became a sheriff's deputy 10 years ago but has 
since become one of the county's two drug investigators, out of necessity. 
He also assists understaffed sheriff's departments in 22 other counties - 
encompassing 1,200 square miles in western Nebraska.

A sign on the highway still calls Lexington an "All America City in an 
All-America county." Schwarz remembers when it was.

"This was open farm country," he says. "You drank beer going down Main 
Street and threw out empty beer cans. We were the rabble-rousers then."

Residents of Lexington - both Hispanic and white - have been caught selling 
meth in bars, farm fields or the parking lot at Wal-Mart. There are now 
four confirmed street gangs in town, all connected with documented gangs 
from California, Mexico or Guatemala. Some of the Lexington groups practice 
initiation rituals that involve being beaten or, for women, being forced to 
have sex with several members. The last homicide in Lexington, in November, 
was gang-related - a man was stabbed outdoors along a street called Oregon 
Trail.

Elizabeth Waterman, the county prosecutor here, says that her office is 
overloaded with meth cases and that she wants to hire two more lawyers. But 
applicants are turned off when they find out about the workload. Another 
problem is that in western Nebraska, District Court judges travel between 
rural counties and show up in Lexington every week or two. Many felony drug 
crimes have to be pleaded down to misdemeanors, so they don't have to go 
before a district judge.

"In the pre-meth days, you saw investigations into things that don't seem 
serious now - like marijuana distribution," says Waterman. "I don't want to 
give the impression that it's OK. But it used to be that it was a real big 
deal if someone was found to be in possession of a pound of marijuana."

Nebraska authorities have seen widespread meth use in high schools and are 
concerned it's spreading to pupils as young as 12 or 13. At Lexington High 
School and Lexington Middle School, counselors are planning to show a video 
called "Methamphetamines: The Icy Death."

Throughout the state, though, meth is described as an ill that can be 
cured. Law enforcement authorities like to point out that, despite an 
apparent lack of narcotics experience, they were able to handle a milder 
outbreak of cocaine use in the 1980s.

Randy Morehead, a criminal investigator with the Nebraska State Patrol, 
says he's seen small-town cops go up against drug-traffickers, and actually 
likes their chances.

For example, Morehead recalls how it took old-fashioned policing to nab a 
meth-trafficker in St. Paul, Neb., (population 2,009) last year. A box 
containing 80 needles, tiny bags with meth residue and an envelope with a 
ZIP code scrawled on it was found in a field. An officer in the St. Paul 
Police Department traced it to a house - with help from his father, who 
works at the post office.

"Working a small town has its advantages," says Morehead. "We just called Dad."

Meth is cheaper than cocaine and creates longer highs, giving it instant 
appeal after surfacing in new, rural locales.

In Lexington, Fernando Barranco, a substance abuse counselor, says many of 
his clients - a mix of Hispanic and white men and women - are employees at 
the meat-packing plant. They used the drug - innocently, they assumed - for 
energy to work extra hours and gain overtime pay.

Barranco has also treated housewives on farms who heard meth was an 
"upper," and took it to impress demanding husbands, lose weight or stay 
alert to care for children. Within months, they became so dependent they 
were trafficking to make money to buy more, he said.

While states such as Nebraska, Kansas and Iowa have been alarmed by meth 
being smuggled in, they are equally concerned that residents can make it at 
home. Various mixes of over-the-counter goods - from salt, batteries and 
engine starter to drain cleaner and matches - can be combined to make meth. 
When mixed the wrong way, these concoctions can ignite and be deadly.

HIDTA offices have contacted retailers, pleading that they take note if 
customers are buying obvious lab ingredients. Most Wal-Mart stores now have 
a warning signal that alerts cashiers when a customer buys more than three 
boxes of Sudafed or generic pseudoephedrine, which are often used to make 
the drug.

Bryan Whitt, manager at a Wal-Mart outside Omaha, says his security guards 
watch for odd combinations of items at the registers. In December, the 
store called police, who arrived to arrest a man who left with eight boxes 
of Sudafed and lithium batteries.

"That," recalls Whitt, "made it obvious what he was going to do."

In Grand Island - with a population of 42,000, it's one of Nebraska's 
larger cities - meth has been available in pockets for more than a decade. 
But in the past three years, it has become such a part of life that some 
young adults feel out of place if they're not users.

"If I left jail right now, I'd go one block and I could have meth like 
that," says Danny Hatcher, 32, a father of four and recovering user serving 
time in the county jail. "Before, if you were shooting dope, you felt like 
a monster. Now, if you ain't shooting dope you must be a cop." Hatcher will 
be transferred to the state penitentiary for eight to 12 years. He has been 
arrested on an array of drug, assault and burglary charges. He says there 
were times when he wanted to stop using meth, but friends in Grand Island 
pressured him to continue.

Some Nebraskans pretend that the meth problem isn't there. At the Coney 
Island Cafe, three blocks from the county jail in Grand Island, owner Gus 
Katrouzos prefers to talk about the five generations of children who have 
come for his famous hot dogs and malts than to discuss any drug problem.

"Good people still ignore it," he says. "You don't talk about it. You just 
go to church and pray a lot."
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